On 01/04/2018 09:08 PM, Mathieu Lirzin wrote: >> If I understand GNU Coding Standards, we really do want to make sure >> unambiguous abbreviations of long options work. > > I am unaware of such GCS recommandation. Do you have a pointer to the > part of the standards suggesting that? Hmm. I just re-read https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html#Command_002dLine-Interfaces, and all I can see is that it recommends: "Please define long-named options that are equivalent to the single-letter Unix-style options. We hope to make GNU more user friendly this way. This is easy to do with the GNU function getopt_long." and then I extrapolated that since getopt_long() recognizes unambiguous abbreviations, anything else used instead of getopt_long() should do likewise. But you're right that it does not seem to be an explicit requirement, so much as an ease-of-use and consistency issue. -- Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer Red Hat, Inc. +1-919-301-3266 Virtualization: qemu.org | libvirt.org